Build a Skype Server for Your Home Phone System

Build this Skype server to provide 24/7 phone service through regular phone handsets in your home—and save a bundle of money in the process!

Safely Cutting Your Phone Line

To cut your incoming phone wires safely, you need a pair of wire
cutters (or sharp scissors) with insulated handles, a roll of electrical
insulation tape, and you need to follow a simple procedure to
do the cutting (Figure 6).

Your phone wires are powered by the telephone company; that's why your
regular telephone works during a power cut. Now, even if you've had the
phone company disconnect you, your phone wires may or may not still
have electrical power. Consequently, you must be careful not to short the
wires when cutting them. Even a momentary short can be bad news. This
can happen if you cut two or more wires at the same time (step 1). The
solution is simple, cut only one wire at a time (step 2). As you cut
wires,
you should insulate their exposed ends with electrical tape (step 3).

Now, if this activity looks to be beyond your comfort zone, you
always have the option of calling the phone company and having them send
a technician to do the job for you. Even after paying for this to be
done,
your Skype savings will most likely recoup the cost in very little time.

For those readers who are security-conscious, and don't trust Skype as an
application, building a Skype server has an added advantage. By placing
the Skype server on your Internet connection outside your firewall, you
gain the peace of mind that should a hacker break in to your server, or
compromise Skype somehow, then as the server interfaces with nothing more
than a copper phone line into your home beyond the firewall, any damage
will necessarily be contained and limited to the Skype server outside the
firewall. Worst case is that you'll need to do a reinstall on your Skype
server, and perhaps, a better job of locking it down from a security
point of view so that it can protect itself. Indeed, if your firewall is
sufficiently restrictive that Skype won't work on the inside, then
placing your Skype server outside your firewall is the only way in which
you can take advantage of Skype's phone services.

Working Out Your Savings from Using a Skype Server

Phone bills have a lot in common with taxes. Both are mind numbingly
complex, and both take a lot and give little in return! To help work out
your potential savings from switching to Skype for your phone services,
in whole or in part, I've written a spreadsheet that simplifies the
process and can be downloaded from the Elpis Web site (see the on-line Resources).

You should factor in the cost of building and running a Skype server into
your savings analysis. Running costs will depend on the machine that you
choose to use in order to run Skype 24/7. An old clunker of a machine may
consume so much power that it would be worthwhile to build a new machine
in the long run. As always, run the numbers and make some decisions.

Let's look at the cost of running a small Skype server 24 hours a day,
365 days a year. Without a monitor and other peripherals to guzzle power,
a small modern computer typically consumes between 50W and 100W. If your
cost of electricity is $0.10 per kWh, then the annual cost of running your
Skype server is between $44 and $88. These are just ballpark numbers and
you'll no doubt do your own, but it does show that the cost of running
a Skype server 24/7 is not insignificant. (Cost = power consumed in kW
x 365 days x 24 hours x cost per kWh, where a power consumption of 50W
is 0.05kW and 100W is 0.1kW.)

Everywhere people setting up PBXes for home or office use, using asterisk. It is open-source, uses open standards and is free to use. Why would I want to use a closed source application that will not support a lot of telephone hardware if there is a very good open-source alternative that is used in thousands of business telephone exchanges around the world already?

Neat project and well documented!
I am running the Skype/Telbox setup with my XP laptop. Runs 24/7 and gives access to the landline and Skype phones. Our rural location will lose power ocasionally but the laptop and BBU batteries do hold up for a few hours. The laptop is a P3 and occasionally the CPU has a problem keeping up with the virus scanning etc. and drops out Skype.
Maybe it is time to try out my Ubuntu laptop on Skype.
Has anyone got the Telbox working with Ubuntu yet?
Dave.

Um ... maybe I'm missing something, but how does this work if you don't want to keep your linux box (in my case FC4) logged in to the GUI? In other words, can Skype be invoked from the command line? I hate the thought of having my server logged into Gnome much less hooking upa monitor and keyboard to it. Plus if the box is ever cycled I wouldn't want to have to load up Skype again manually.

You think RedHat is crap? Slackware is dead man, even Debian has better more often updated packages then Slack. Sorry, don't agree with you on that one...
If you really think you should make some waves talking smack about other Linux distros, use Debian and then we're talking!
Peace!

Not me.
I just implied that RedHat isn't a mainstream one. Debian contains too many you must do this, you must do that. Slackware doesn't care if you do not set up a mail service straightaway, or even if you don't need X windows. They even gave up Gnome not long ago.

Especially since the good people at Skype now tell me they are indeed looking into working with Slackware, to test things out. Given time even they will come around.

Debian on the other hand won't. We're lucky that its still considered relevant for other platforms.

And when was the last time you even looked at Slackware? It evolves slowly. Like you humans do.

I also see you replied to my other self. I Strongly suggest that you take the time to try out Slackware 11.0. It may even work for you.

Actually I have changed from Slackware 10.2 to Vector 5.1.1
Vector is a derivative of Slackware.
I have Skype running and quite well. It was not a problem. I just installed it.
I do have a problem and that is that I can't seem to make it ring when I get a call. Very annoying but if I am near the computer and see the little box come on and it tells me I have an incoming call, I can answer. The other thing that works is I can see if I have missed a call and then can return the call.

The Skype adapter's ring voltage generator can only drive one telephone's worth of load. It is incaple of driving the wiring in your house with multiple phones connected. The writer of the article obviously
has never actually built this. It works but only if all your phones are wireless. I have been running my phone system this way for a over a year.

I've had more time to play with SkypeMate. I give up on getting it to work under Slackware 10.2. I ended up using strace to figure out what was going on. To make a long story short, SkypeMate is written for Fedora Core 3. Additional packages will need to be installed and/or upgraded for SkypeMate to work under Slackware 10.2. Example: dbus needs to be installed, gcc needs to be upgraded to 3.4, extra unused mixer devices need to be removed (/dev/mixer3), etc.

At this point, I've pretty much given up on Skype and SkypeMate. Now on to Asterisk.

With Fedora Core being so closely related to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has anyone tried this with RHEL or CentOS?

Skype for Fedora3 installs and launches on CentOS4 without error. I've downloaded the SkypeMate software, also for Fedora3, but it insists on have the Skype-to-Phone adapter in place before proceding with the install.

While I have had both Cable and phone I have found that the cable can go out for days on end but the phone will only be out for a few hours (longer if the wires are down). Anyone going this way should be prepared for the possibility of no phone or internet for days on end.

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